On one day, two reasons for love

To me, the coinciding this year of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day should have offered us at least one day to put aside our fears and reflect on love and our love ones.

Not so.

At least not so if we paid attention to the national news. Another school shooting certainly changed the subject. The news accounts on the major cable networks were once again predictable: CNN largely focusing on guns, FOX on mental illness and family. Once again we point fingers.

A young man, politically wise well beyond his late twenties, said to me on Wednesday night that the solution comes down to term limits. Meeting my skepticism, he explained.

The recent budget bill gave Republicans the military spending they wanted, gave the Democrats the domestic spending they wanted, and the budget busting problem was kicked down the road to be paid for by future generations — namely, his. Because Congress does not have term limits, and the key issue for them is constant re-election, especially from primary challengers, they fear working across the aisle and addressing the tough issues head on.

So Republicans don’t dare cross the NRA, and Democrats dare not cross the civil libertarians concerning privacy and family. So we ignore guns, mental illness and family dysfunction once more.

Today I suggest we begin dialog wherever we can to begin to find solutions to the problem of availability of guns to those with signs of mental illness.

However, I also suggest in addition to recommending serious consideration of term limits as one way to begin to address the legislative part of the problem, that we also look closer to home. I once again address a fundamental issue: underlying family problems that are part of the story in so many shootings.

Some recent writings on the harassment scandals may well provoke a deeper discussion on gender conflict, and ultimately on its impact on children.

Reporting on a French reaction to the #MeToo movement in the United States, Berton sites one French opinion that “...there is a part of our culture where seducing is important and well regarded.” She writes that, “French film stars Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot set off a firestorm last month when they criticized the MeToo movement. Bardot called it 'hypocritical and ridiculous' and Deneuve defended men’s right to ‘hit on women.'” Berton notes that in an open letter “other high-profile French women…argued that the MeToo movement — and its French counterpart…had turned into a witch hunt.”

Enter Noonan with an opening paragraph right up my alley as a grandfather studying the issue. “I used to think America needed a parent to help it behave. Now I think it needs a grandparent. Our culture has been so confused for so long on so many essentials, and has gotten so crosswise on the issue of men and women, that we need more than ever the wisdom of the aged.”

Like the proverbial fool — let an old guy jump in.

Noonan simply suggests we need more gentlemen. She notes that, “A gentleman is good to women because he has his own dignity and sees theirs.” She also notes that, "A gentleman is an encourager of women.”

My grandfather-years tell me that Noonan well expresses the aspirational goals of America’s character. To me, it’s no accident that Martin Luther King ended his most familiar line about judgment, referring to the “…content of their character.” He didn’t point to their intellect, their wisdom or even their soul. In that spirit, it seems legitimate in a secular sense to judge an American gentlemen’s character in large part on how he treats women, especially those closest to him.

Yet those same grandfather-years tell me that Deneuve and Bardot have captured the essence of typical men, and Noonan has prescribed a valid role for men acting as gentlemen toward women. However, there is a missing piece: the valid role of women “seeing the dignity” of men; as “encourager” of men, in the way that Deneuve and Bardot seem to know so well. We need each gender to really understand and help the other. Let’s encourage reciprocal mentoring in the workplace; and keep a focus on mutual love, not mutual abuse, in our homes.

Perhaps like planting a seedling for a magnificent tree years from now, if we start soul-searching today about the place of guns in our society and also about the gender wars that are killing love in our homes, we can truly honor both Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day as one.